sshrc: Piggyback your rc across ssh

I just got a message about sshrc a few weeks ago, but I didn’t make a note of who sent it. 😦 So if it was you, I apologize; I do like to give credit to the discoverers whenever possible.

sshrc allows you to inject your own set of aliases, functions, environment variables and so forth into a remote ssh session. This might be preferable to following the conventions of the host machine, particularly if you’re used to a specific command or alias.

And as you can see, it works quite well. sshrc keeps its own configuration file, so you don’t have to make any changes to your local .bashrc or .bash_profile to use it.

According to the home page, sshrc can also piggyback special files or scripts in your ssh journeys, such as vim configurations or other specialized rc files. That might sound somewhat dangerous, as if it could potentially overwrite distant files.

But the home page promises they’ll be kept out of harm’s way and in a unique location that won’t taint any other configuration files. I leave it to you to decide if that’s the case.

sshrc is another of those programs that I wish I had more call to use. As it is, I keep mostly the same configuration across all the machines I have right now, and it’s a very rare case that I have something special on one machine that I don’t have on another.

I can see where sshrc would be useful though. I plan to keep this in the back of my mind, should the need ever arise. 😉